Tough Love

German gay activist filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim continues the examination of sexuality, gender and power he has built across 70 films. Here, he introduces us to a loving provincial judo coach and his partner, only to reveal the brutality that shaped them both - savage abuse, sexual and physical, cruel displacement of feelings into pimping, violence and prostitution and a slow, tortured path to new lives. As modern interviews and painful reconstructions intertwine, we are drawn into and through their worlds into a new empathy.